I believe Associated Press has invested in Bambuser.
AP wants to encourage citizen journalism since, in their case, they can make money by distributing your reporting.
Apparently if you explain that you're a citizen journalist and approved, you can get a free professional account.

I'm not sure what the reasoning is behind forcing free accounts to use the inbuilt encoding. I can't see any market advantage or cost savings in that. Maybe it impacts their server costs. It may be that they just want the citizen journalist streams to look better so viewers will gravitate to that.

Livestream, Ustream, Bambuser all catered to citizen journalists for a time. Livestream gave free Premium channels to many of the Occupy locations. I believe Ustream may have done the same at a later point. I know the Occupy media people were unhappy using Qik to send to Original Livestream so they approached Bambuser.

It seems AP so money in it by having an inexpensive source for live news coverage and so invested in Bambuser, which now as policy, will give free pro accounts to citizen journalists.